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<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Another misty morning turned into warm sunshine day. The house was abuzz with contractors finishing the painting and preparing for the flooring in the basement. Went for a walk this afternoon and started a new audiobook\u2014another Inspector Gamache (book 14). I\u2019m trying to pace myself because I want her series to go on forever. The neighborhood is full of Halloween decorations this year. There must have been a surplus of plastic skeletons because every third house seems to have them in various poses on their front porches or hanging from trees or creeping around house corners. I\u2019m even seeing spider, dog, and cat skeletons. I guess the manufacturers don\u2019t know that spiders don\u2019t have bones, but I miss the point, I\u2019m sure. One house has dozens of skeletons all over the yard and on the roof. I\u2019ll be sure to get a picture of them this year.<\/p>\n
Tonight I had my Tree Wisdom class on Zoom. This week\u2019s assignment video discussed Suzanne Simard\u2019s research about how trees are connected and communicate with one another via their roots and an underground network of fungi. Trees form communities and actually help one another by sending warning signals when they\u2019re under attack from insects or stressed from environmental conditions. They also share nutrients\u2014the healthier ones with surplus nutrients send their stash to trees in need. In fact, there\u2019s probably more activity going on underground than above ground. Trees are symbiotically connected below the surface. Likewise humans are connected beneath the surface, yet we refuse to see it. We want to believe we are all individuals that must preserve our individuality instead of behaving like the symbiotic organisms we are, in community.<\/p>\n
When I studied forestry in college we didn\u2019t really know any of this; it was all about growing trees as big as possible as quickly as possible to cut them down for our use. We were taught we had to thin forests to reduce competition; that trees competed for resources and they needed Man\u2019s \u201chelp\u201d to be released from imprisonment by other trees. Simultaneously, we were taught not to anthropomorphize nature; imposing feelings on non-human living things was folly and feeble-minded. Doing so blinded us to the goal of forest and wildlife management. Well, what a bunch of hooey! Who\u2019s doing the anthropomorphizing by projecting our human-centered belief that living things must essentially be killed to reduce competition? Who\u2019s made the assumption that trees compete for resources just like humans? Time to start listening more to trees.<\/p>\n
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